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Gaudium Et Spes: the Task Before Us (RICHARD S CHENK

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Gaudium Et Spes: the Task Before Us (RICHARD S CHENK Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 323–35 323 Gaudium et Spes: The Task Before Us RICHARD SCHENK,O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, California THE ESSAY by George Weigel presented to us here for discussion is representative at several levels of the current status quaestionis regarding the Second Vatican Council.The fortieth anniversary of Vaticanum II brought a good deal of detailed scholarship on the genesis and formulation of the Council documents.1 As Weigel’s essay suggests, by its dealing less with the process of writing the pastoral constitution than with its broader inter- pretative issues in the context of what is widely perceived as the post- conciliar transition from late modernity to postmodernity,the theological discussions occasioned by the upcoming fiftieth anniversary are likely to shift to questions concerning the most fitting hermeneutic of the Coun- cil. Anticipating the fortieth anniversary, the work of the Bologna school around G. Alberigo documented in generous and accessible detail the dynamic that can be described as an often less-than-pacific coexistence at the Council of two parties, the proponents of which admittedly could shift somewhat from document to document and issue to issue: a major- ity, willing to assert positions in significant discontinuity from the eccle- sial and theological habits of thought and practice dominant in the decades or even centuries prior to the Council; and a minority,hoping to preserve the very continuity that the majority was willing to forego.The documents were a compromise between this majority position of—at 1 Cf. esp. Giuseppe Alberigo et al., History of Vatican II, English version ed. Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1996–1998), vol. 1–5; as well as the more systematic and synthetic portrayals in Peter Hünermann and Bernd Jochen Hilberath, eds., Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2004–2005), vol. 1–5. 324 Richard Schenk, O.P. times—wide-ranging discontinuity and a minority position of resolute continuity.The final acceptance of these dialectically weighted documents by the whole Council and the papacy is not usually referred to as the work of a (super-) majority, although at times Weigel’s essay comes close to this kind of somewhat confusing, if understandable, language.2 The detailed historical analyses associated with the fortieth anniversary of the Council, despite receiving some polemical criticism, provide a reli- able guide to primary source material and its place in the history.They also offer what is on the whole a plausible and well-documented account of the debates, bringing important nuance to the four older paradigms that used to dominate readings of the Council. Prior to these works, there had been two common readings by those who saw the Council chiefly as a break with the past: the reading of those who greeted the supposed break,3 sometimes going so far as to view the post-conciliar papacies as betraying the “Spirit” of the Council by repairing the breach, necessitat- ing for the near future a still more novel Vaticanum III to make the rupture irreversible; and the view of those who regretted the alleged rupture, spawning schismatic communities that felt the need to deny the de facto exercise of the Magisterium in order to save its de iure possibilities. Prior to the fortieth anniversary, there had also been two common read- ings of the Council by those who saw it as largely in keeping with the past: the reading of those who regretted most of the post-conciliar devel- opments in theology as a profound misrepresentation of the Council itself, not the result of the Council’s own weaknesses; and those who regretted post-conciliar papal teaching and leadership as proof that the Council had not yet changed as thoroughly as the pars melior had intended 2 Cf. the programmatic sentence from Weigel’s essay: “The reading of Gaudium et Spes that follows assumes that the majority of the Council Fathers intended the Pastoral Constitution to be understood through a ‘hermeneutic of reform’—and then asks whether Gaudium et Spes properly read the ‘signs of the times’” (see Weigel, 253, n. 3). For the legitimate nuances introduced by the post-conciliar reception of the watchword “the signs of the times,” by which later theologians combined the majority desire to look for God’s presence in the world with the minority sense of how our world is often all too far from him, cf. R. Schenk, “Officium signa temporum perscrutandi. New Encounters of Gospel and Culture in the Context of the New Evangelisation,” in Scrutinizing the Signs of the Times in Light of the Gospel, ed. Johan Verstraeten (Leuven: Leuven University Press, and Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 167–203. 3 For a recent, more moderate version of this hermeneutic applied to the concil- iar innovations toward non-Christian religions, cf. John T.Noonan, A Church that Can and Cannot Change:The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Gaudium et Spes: The Task before Us 325 to change the vision of the Church or traditionally Catholic views on faith, hierarchy, or non-Catholic religions.4 Since the historical work occasioned by the fortieth anniversary of the Council, two more nuanced paradigms have come to the fore. Unlike the trend of many, perhaps most, earlier works, both of these newer readings stress that the Council documents are de facto a blend of innovation and preservation vis-à-vis traditions dominant just prior to the Council. They differ, however, in this: one interpretation tends to view only the majority position as normative and legitimate, while considering the minority posi- tion regrettable.This reading is most often proposed by writers who, having personally attended the Council, continue the debates in pretty much the same terms and alternatives familiar to them from the adversarial discussions at the Council.This interpretation rejects as normative the de facto compro- mise it describes.The frank account by Giuseppe Alberigo in A Brief History of Vatican II 5 provided a helpful example of this tendency.Alberigo identi- fied his circle of friends and mentors with the majority. Freely awarded modifiers, bluntly separating “fortunate” from “unfortunate” developments at the Council, underline the personal stance behind the book, based on memories of personal involvement in the events by the late author and his wife,Angelina Nicora, whose journals are cited here at length as authorita- tive.6 The book presents the majority’s successful interventions with the pope as something altogether positive. By contrast, the minority’s occasion- ally successful interventions with the pope are portrayed as nefarious and opposed to the conciliar dynamic. Official and spontaneous subgroups of the majority are portrayed as pro-conciliar; those of the minority, as anti- conciliar.7 A similar pattern recurs in other works of this school. Of the three “underlying issues” that John O’Malley identifies in the Council, 4 For the alleged but regretted continuity in the concept of faith, cf., for example, the critical remarks by Eilert Herms,“Offenbarung und Glaube als Gegenstand des ökumenischen Dialogs,” in Jahrbuch des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, vol. 7 (1996), ed. Richard Schenk et al. (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1995), 251–86. 5 Giuseppe Alberigo, A Brief History of Vatican II (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006); cf. in much the same vein John W.O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); and the first essays in John W. O’Malley et al., eds., Did Anything Happen at Vatican II (New York:Continuum, 2008), which contain a sharp counterpoint to claims of conti- nuity. A one-sided hermeneutic of continuity, though inadequate, is not corrected by a hermeneutic asserting the sole normativity of discontinuity. 6 For example,Alberigo, A Brief History, 52–54. 7 For the qualification as good of cases of influence and preparation by the major- ity or of papal intervention in its favor, cf. Alberigo, A Brief History, 5–6, 16, 19, 24, 27–31, 36, 52, and 61; for the opposite qualification of similar activities in favor of the minority, cf. 28, 47, 52. 326 Richard Schenk, O.P. namely, the nature of ecclesial change (aggiornamento, development or ressourcement), the shifting of power to either the periphery or the center, and the questions of style (for example, as regards definitive language), he sees the minority influence in the first and especially the second set of issues as a hindrance to the genuine conciliar dynamic.8 Arguably,interpreters can be still too close to the de facto, “political” reality of the Council to see its potential for a truth beyond the experienced conflict. Such a hermeneutic suggests a refusal of the breadth of the Council’s own decisions, the throw- ing of punches after the final bell had sounded.9 An alternative interpretation, while also accepting the overall account of events as portrayed in terms of divergent majority and minority voices, differs from this first new hermeneutic by accepting the promulgated documents as marking the received parameters of Catholic teaching, from within which a future synthesis should be sought. This hermeneutic proceeds from the expectation, documented in the conciliar texts, that both majority and minority positions point to elements deserving future development, to thoughts that should not be lost.10 What such syntheses
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